Medals found after mud hunt

MICK Taylor’s heart sank when he thought he’d lost his grandfather’s World War I medals but somehow hope won out over the impossible.

Mick, who goes by the nickname Squizzy – after the early 1920s Melbourne gangster – was, like many people, devastated by the floods.

Water and mud invaded his Moores Pocket Road home in Tivoli but worse was to come when he couldn’t find the medals.

“I had them in the drawers of an antique sewing machine. They were entrusted to me a few years ago,” Mr Taylor said.

“It was only after my mate said about finding a plastic container with his granddad’s medals from the Second World War that I thought about them. I was walking around not thinking real straight.

“I looked in the sewing machine and they were gone. I was pretty devastated at the time.”

Squizzy’s grandfather, Edwin David Taylor, enlisted on March 9, 1915, as a private.

He embarked in Sydney on June 25, 1915, in the 19th Battalion of the AIF.

He was wounded twice, once a bad leg injury at Pozieres in France, and he received a bravery medal for rescuing a wounded mate. He was promoted to corporal and then lieutenant before he returned to Australia on May 6, 1919.

“It was really playing on my mind. He earned those medals,” said Mr Taylor, who was living with a mate after the floods.

“So I was waking up in the middle of the night, stuff like that.”

Hoping against hope he decided to embark on an unlikely search for the medals.

“Every arvo for about a week and a half after work I came home, got a big stick out and scratched around in the mud,” he said.

“After about a week and a half of looking I saw a big pile of rubbish and tipped over a lump of mud and broke it up. There was a plastic bag at the bottom, sticking out from the mud.

“I pulled it out and there they were. I didn’t believe it at first.

“I was pretty chuffed when I found them.

“I went up to my mate’s place and threw them on the table and he said: ‘You’ve got to be kidding’.